


Her Birthday

by ImhereImQuire



Category: Vampire Chronicles - Anne Rice
Genre: Child Death, Gen, Grief, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-12
Updated: 2013-01-12
Packaged: 2017-11-25 05:18:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/635513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ImhereImQuire/pseuds/ImhereImQuire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claudia's birthday. Neither Lestat nor Louis have ever forgotten to mark it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Her Birthday

It was Louis who felt the grief most keenly on the anniversary of her death, but for Lestat it was her birthday. He had lost all sense of time when she died, and were it not for Louis he wouldn’t have even known the date of her death at all. But her birthday? He’d remembered and marked it for nearly eighty years before she and Louis had left him and it was a habit that he still hadn’t broken. He’d take the little scrap of yellow silk from his bottom drawer, and go and sit in her room, alone.

Louis could never bear to be around him on this date. There was too much unresolved between them, too many accusations, too much pain. No, Louis was with David, who in many ways seemed a better suited companion for Louis than he had ever managed to be. He was alone. 

The silence was so empty that he couldn’t help but speak, if only to try and fill it up with something other than absence.

“Don’t think that I don’t still think of you” He said softly. “There isn’t a wonder of this era that I haven’t wished that I could show you, ma petite.” He sighed deeply, his voice slightly strained “I pretend that you’re still with me, sometimes. I go for a walk and if I don’t look down then it’s easy to imagine that you’re at my side”.

He heard the front door click and for one small, completely irrational moment he thought that it was her. Absurd thought really, but it was enough to bring the tears to his eyes, forcing him to swallow sobs.

It was a few moments before the bedroom door opened. “You didn’t answer your phone” said Louis quietly. “I was worried about you”

“Worried? What could possibly happen to me? I’m invincible” he asked, and there was enough bitterness in the statement that Louis knew he had been right to come, to leave his own little shrine of chrysanthemums and come and find his maker. It had been this time last year when Lestat had tried to test that theory in the desert.

“I thought that this year… perhaps we could do this together?” Louis said cautiously, and there was a long moment where Lestat looked as though he was going to reject him with some biting cruelty that Louis couldn’t cope with on this day. But the moment passed, and the blond merely patted the floor beside him, and Louis sat.

It was Lestat who eventually broke the silence. “This year I would have gotten her one of those electronic tablets. I’m sure digital art would have fascinated her” he offered. It was a previously secret little ritual of his, that he would go through the motions of shopping for a present for her each year, even if he didn’t physically buy it.

“Scrabble. I miss our old games” said Louis immediately. The lack of thought on the matter made it obvious that he had been done the same. Lestat rest his head on the other’s shoulder, and Louis’ arm curled around him, offering quiet comfort. Louis smelled like her tonight, the floral scent clung his clothes that of her favourite blooms, and it was that which destroyed the blonde’s composure; any idea he’d had about remaining strong gone to ruin as he broke down and cried, the faint scent of blood in his own hair telling him that Louis was doing likewise.


End file.
